i'm hungry

tengo hambre. not much, but enough to make me start off talking about it. for some reason i always manage to forget that on sundays this country closes down. you'd be lucky to find a store open selling water to people dying of thirst. in addition, i don't usually possess the foresight that would enable me to buy groceries for a couple days at a time instead of making it a daily adventure to see whether or not i can feed myself. today i couldn't. i woke up late and had a lunch of french fries that i managed to make myself and then today while walking around i had a popsicle and then tonight i've had water and teddy grahams. or chiquilin ositos. same thing.

last night was el noche blanco here in madrid. i guess it's the second time they've done it so far and it's been done by other cities in europe for years. the city basically stays open all night with lots of exhibitions by artists and performers that take place in the street. i guess the museums were open all night as well but i had better things to do on a night like that than to look at a bunch of old paintings i could waste a sunday on.

started out by going to the palacio real with my friends boris and ilya to check out the gardens and to see what they were setting up there for the night. here is a picture.


this is a picture of ilya and boris riding wild boars. they are such brave friends.


after that we went to retiro park where a very random performance art piece was taking place on the lake in the middle of the park. creepy people dressed in black costumes with weird masks rowed boats out to the middle of the lake and on the front of the boats were mermaid-esque topless spanish girls wearing turquoise sequined ballroom masks with long hair covering their torsos. they were supposed to be sirens i'm pretty sure. they rowed to the middle and turned and faced back the way they came, probably 20 boats, each with a creepy monster thing in black rowing and these mermaid chicks. about 20 more boats then launched from the shore, one in particular leading them. each of these boats had a creepy rowing monster too, but instead of topless spanish women, there was another eerily dressed guy playing a tuba with a single light glowing at the top of the instrument. they played eerie noises and rowed towards the mermaid boats with the guy leading the tubas clanging a bell. it was supposed to be like a ship i think sailing towards these sirens. they then just chased each other all over the lake, the whole time these creepy tuba noises and bell clangings just echoing through the lake, over the water, against the statues and the people and it was a very strange and weirdly inspiring visual.

from this i ran to my friend lyndsey's to have dinner and i swear this girl and her roommates never disappoint. the food i eat there is as good as any i've ever had time and time again. i did the dishes again and all the women swooned. i'm so popular. we went out to meet my friends in sol to head to some more exhibitions that we'd scheduled in different parts of the city through the night only to find that it had started raining while i was eating delicious food. the whole things kind of shut down because nothing could really go on outdoors so we sat on a bench, in the rain while some girl had my hoodie on because i am so nice and froze for a bit until we wandered to a bar where the girls had to flirt with the bouncers to get me in because i was wearing shorts and my nikes because i'd been walking around all day and had planned on continuing doing so throughout the night and not going to some lame bar with music and bouncers wearing suits but plans change and i got in and danced for a bit to pulse thumping bass blaring blips and bleeps european electronica at it's finest. all the other people were from italy or france so they loved it. yay.

this is a picture. my smile is fake. theirs are not. my mom hates it when i do this. i can hear her now actually.



walked around a little more after that and had planned on going to the showing of a movie that daft punk made that was to the south a little bit in the city but a pretty long walk so we were planning on taking the metro. all the other girls had gone home and i was left with a french girl and we went to the nearest metro station but for some unknown reason, on the night that the city had put months of planning into to keep everyone out all night going all over the city, they decided to shut down the metro at the normal time of 2. it makes no sense, didn't last night and not even today after a bit of sleep. so that was a bust and after walking the girl home i ended up walking the hour back to my house to finally talk to my parents briefly at 6 in the morning here when my mom asked me if i was drunk in code ('are you seeing double'?).

thanks mom, but i'd been out walking around for 16 hours and hadn't had a drink in a while.

passed out pretty tired and woke up at 1 only to discover that i had no food. studied and walked around a park for while.

life is good.